OUR INCOME TAXATION: THE DARKER SIDE
by
Charles Adams
(This
piece was dedicated by Charles Adams to CATS members all
across
America. It is his wish that you will
share it widely in
hopes we
can once and for all rid America of the scourge of the
income
tax and the Internal Revenue Service.
Please cross-post
and
share by all means at your disposal.)
The
economics of our income tax has been under assault
recently
by some of our best economists and tax men.
The
general
conclusion seems to be that this tax acts as a drag
on the
economy, slowing economic growth, producing
chronic
inflation, discouraging savings and enterprise, and
putting
America at some disadvantage in world trade with
those
nations, especially the miracle economies, who have
moderate,
simpler tax systems -- systems that encourage and
promote
capitalism.
The
darker side I speak of has little to do with trade and
economics
-- it has to do with the spiritual values that were
at the
core of the founding of America. The
destruction of
these
values by our income tax would come as no surprise if,
in our
education, we had learned that most great empires
taxed
themselves to death, spiritually as well as economically.
The Founders
as well as the ancient Greeks and Romans warned
future
generations about the tyranny that would befall any nation
that
adopted a tax system like we have endured.
Their words
speak
from the past, like the ancient prophets from Biblical
times. Consider Rome's spiritual demise.
The
Statue of Liberty was a gift from the French to commemorate
the 100
year anniversary of American independence.
She stands at
the
entrance to New York's harbor as an inspiration to the nation
and the
millions of immigrants who arrived from Europe by ship
before
the jet-age, "yearning to breath free." She was really a
gift
from the Romans. The Goddess of Liberty
was on Roman coins,
just
like she was on our gold coins and early 50c piece; she was
honored
with a number of temples, and Roman writers proclaimed,
"Liberty
is a possession on which no evaluation can be placed,"
and
"Freedom is beloved above all things." 1/ Yet the coins and
temples
disappeared almost 200 years before Rome's official
demise
when the Emperor Diocletian enslaved the Roman people to
ensure
tax compliance, and he achieved this end by chaining every
taxpayer
to his land, shop, or job. One leading
Roman historian
acknowledged
that Diocletian's tax system did indeed save Rome,
but he
never asked "whether it was worthwhile to save the Roman
Empire
in order to make a vast prison for scores of millions of
men."
2/
The
Romans did not submit to this tax enslavement without
resistance,
so the Roman state resorted to brutal, savage
punishments. Zisimos, a Greek writer during this period,
tells us
that
the scourge and rack were used against taxpayers; and to
make
the system work, fathers were compelled to prostitute their
daughters,
and even children were sold into slavery. 3/
As one
Roman
declared, "Let us flee to some place where we may live as
free
men." 4/
This
viciousness of the Roman state towards its citizen
taxpayers
is what we need to focus upon, because it soon infected
the
relation of the people with one another.
Salvian, the Bishop
of Marseilles
at Rome's fall, describes the evil, the decadence
and
cruelty that the tax system had created.
As he said, any
individual
with any sense of human decency would seek out another
homeland.
5/ "Rome was like a mother cancer
cell that passed
its
vicious propensities on to its children." 6/
A
similar pattern appeared in Imperial Spain a thousand
years
later. Spain, like Rome, taxed itself
to death. To
enforce
a similarly abusive, excessive tax system, Spain fell
back on
"applying the screw" to reluctant taxpayers. 7/
"Applying
the screw" was not a figure of speech, like the
Roman
scourge it was an instrument of torture.
Unlike Rome,
Spanish
taxpayer resistance was disastrous for the state. Over
six
major tax revolts erupted during the height of Spain's glory
and
there is little doubt these revolts drained the strength of
the
Crown and permitted Britain, France, and the Netherlands to
take
over much of what was the greatest empire of all time.
Spanish
taxpayers responded with the same brutality meted
out by
the tax bureau. In 1520, taxpayer
deputies, summoned by
the
Crown, promised their constituents there would be "no new
taxes." However, the financial goodies promised by
the king were
too
tempting so they voted for new taxes.
Riots erupted
throughout
Spain. In Segovia, an angry mob seized
the local
deputy
and as they led him off for execution, his plea to receive
the
last sacraments was denied -- there was to be no forgiveness in
this
life nor the life to come. I wonder,
what would these angry
taxpayers
have done to members of Congress who approved Clinton's
taxes? Or to George Bush who breached his promise
of "no new
taxes?"
The
response of Spanish taxpayers included evasion and
emigration. The Spanish operated the most massive system
of tax
fraud
and evasion ever known, notwithstanding that the Crown
threatened
evaders with the death penalty. All
trade from the
New
World was engaged in one gigantic smuggling operation. If
that
wasn't enough, people fled from Spain in great numbers. As
one
historian observed, "In place of wondering at the
depopulation
of villages and farms, the wonder is that any
of them
remain." 8/
The use
of cruel and savage punishments to enforce taxes has
repeated
itself often throughout the course of Western history.
In
France a hundred years of violence against taxpayers and even
tax
collectors, culminated in the French Revolution in which the
tax man
came out on the short end -- indeed, the whole lot of them
were
shortened about 10 to 12 inches apiece after the man who ran
the
guillotine had finished his work -- no tears were shed when
their
heads flopped into the basket.
In the
18th Century, Sir Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime
minister,
used "vicious punishments" to enforce his tax system.
He was,
as one biography described him, "In no way squeamish
about
the liberties of the individual," and he used "savage
punishments,
and the full authority of the Crown to make the
public
conform to his system [of taxes]."
Eventually, riots spread
throughout
Britain, as an "expression of a profound and
cumulative
hatred of a system oppressive, tyrannical, and corrupt
[with
power]." 9/ When Sir William
Blackstone wrote his great
treatise
(still in print), Commentaries on the Laws of England
(1765),
there was no praise for Walpole's tax enforcements, they
were
"arbitrary" and "hardly compatible with the temper of a free
nation."10/ That same condemnation would easily apply to
our
income
tax laws today. It was less than 25
years after the riots
in
Britain over Walpole's tax laws that the British colonists in
North
America sensed the same sort of tax policy coming their
way,
and they were willing to resort to violence and even treason
against
the Crown's taxes.
The
Founders of America were well aware of the history summarized
above. The great sage of the Enlightenment,
Montesquieu, in his
The
Spirit of Laws
(1751), inspired the Framers of the
Constitution,
and much of its form can be traced to this great
book. He was a tax-philosopher historian. If our current tax
makers
and we as a people had been schooled in his studies, as
the
Framers of our Constitution were schooled, we may not be
having
the tax troubles that now infect our whole social order.
He
taught emphatically that excessive taxation produces slavery;
noting
that men living in a liberty-oriented society will
foolishly
submit to excessive taxation. He added
a further
observation,
that excessive taxes will require, "extraordinary
means
of oppression." And from that,
"the country is ruined." 11/
This conclusion
of Montesquieu was not a theory, it was
plainly
visible to him as a fact in the governments of his
day and
of those in history. With Montesquieu
we are not dealing
with
logic, we are dealing with what Oliver Wendell Holmes had in
mind
when he said, "A page of history is worth a volume of
logic."
12/
The
leading writer for the American Revolution was Thomas
Paine. "Without the pen of Paine," said
John Adams in poetic
rhyme,
"Washington would have wielded his sword in vain."
Washington
had Paine's pamphlets distributed to his troops to
read
when they were in Winter Quarters during the dark days of
the
war. America was a land of liberty,
wrote Paine, because it
was a
land of low taxes. Excessive taxes
produced tyranny, he
wrote,
caused by the foolish and naive attitude of the people
toward
their government by believing that "government is some
wonderful
mysterious thing." And when the
people believe that
illusion,
"excessive revenues are obtained." 13/
What
drove men to revolution was simply overtaxing and overblown
governments. In short, when a government is just,
"taxes are
few." And revolution was necessary and justified
to bring about
a
government "less expensive and more productive," which would
bring
about "peace, civilization and commerce." 14/
Let us
leave the past and the Founders, and see what shadows of
the
past are cast upon us with our income tax.
Montesquieu tells
us
excessive taxes produce, "extraordinary means of oppression."
Has
that happened to us?
First. Our income tax has evolved from an honor
system to a
spy
system.
In the
1950s it was routine for an IRS agent to begin his audit
by
telling the taxpayer, "Ours is an honor system, which is the
only
way it will work in a free society."
Supreme Court Justice
Jackson,
a former chief counsel for the IRS, said at this time
that
instances of self-serving mistakes and outright evasion were
rare --
and that was at a time when the infamous "Information"
returns
were nonexistent. 15/ Banks did not
report anything
to the
IRS about the affairs of their customers.
Nothing that
went
through a bank account was photographed and held in storage
for Big
Brother to see. Interest income was not
reported;
dividends
were not reported; real estate
transactions and income
was not
reported; stock transactions were not
reported; income
from
independent workers was not reported.
Only wages were
reported
and that was done to enable workers to file for a tax
refund. U.S. Customs did not demand to know how much
money or
travelers
checks you were carrying, nor did they punish and
confiscate
amounts in your possession which were unreported. The
tax
system was an honor system, and it worked.
Why did
we evolve from an honor system to a spy system? The
answer
is the same reason why Diocletian had to adopt a
serf-system
-- to make taxpayers pay. People were
not complying
with
the tax law, pure and simple. Gibbon in
his Decline and Fall
of
the Roman Empire,
describes this period as "a perpetual
struggle
between the powers of oppression and the arts of fraud."
16/ That description, with the addition of
"the arts of
avoidance,"
is not altogether inappropriate for our system, and
the
reason why totalitarian surveillance is necessary to make our
income
tax work. Isn't it time we asked -- as
was asked about
Diocletian's
systems -- is our income tax worth saving when it
won't
work without massive espionage and savage punishments to
ensure
compliance? Is this not a sign of a
sick tax system and
of a
shift from a free society to a totalitarian state as
happened
in Rome?
The
danger that income taxes may produce a massive espionage
system
and destroy much of the liberty of the people was a
distinct
possibility at the time America adopted its first income
tax. Even the experts were aware of the risk, but
they were
quick
to argue it would not be a possibility with the long
traditions
of freedom of the American people. The
danger became
apparent
because of the income tax system in Prussia, which,
according
to one German legislator who opposed the system,
covered
the country with "a perfect system of espionage. 17/ In
an
income tax audit, a taxpayer who was involved with securities,
would
be asked, "How many stocks did you sell this year? On what
day and
at what exchange did you sell them?
What is the price of
each? What is the name of each company in which
you have
securities?" This was considered oppressive, the
"espionage"
that
income tax advocates in America in 1914 assured the people,
would never
happen here. They claimed:
The administrative methods employed in
Germany ... would
be impracticable almost anywhere
else. In no other place
is the bureaucracy so powerful. Nowhere else are the people
so meek in the face of officialdom. In no other country of
the world would it be possible to enforce
so inquisitorial a
procedure as we have learned to be
customary in Prussia.
18/
Of
course, the above writer, Professor Edwin Seligman (whose
books
did so much to cause the adoption of the 16th Amendment)
was
dead wrong -- 100% wrong. There is
nothing of a fiscal nature
you do
that is not reported to the tax man.
His power is
unlimited,
unrestrained, and is more in keeping with a
totalitarian
state than a free society. If the
Prussian tax
system
was a perfect system of espionage, ours is a superperfect
system
of espionage.
An IRS
agent, writing under a pseudonym, "Diogenes," contends
that
neither "Soviet Russia or Red China can boast of agencies
that
beat the IRS on all these counts [espionage] ... The Gestapo?
Not a
contender either."
Second,
we have had to resort to savage, psychopathic punishments
to make
the income tax system work.
Backing
up the espionage is the fear of punishment -- severe,
Long-term
prison terms which hang over the heads of all
taxpayers. Every March and April, prosecutions are
published as
front
page items, to put terror and to intimidate every taxpayer
as the
tax return season is in full force.
Thomas
Paine wrote that, "An avidity to punish is always dangerous
to
liberty." 20/ Some punitive
measures are, at times necessary
for tax
enforcement, but have we gone too far?
Are we out-of-step
with a
free society? With the rest of Western
civilization?
Outside
of the former Soviet Union, no nation treats its tax
offenders
with such harshness, to the point of being
psychopathic. Is tax money so important, or are we so
sick, as
to have
to treat tax offenders on a par with vicious, dangerous
criminals? Historians now call Walpole's punishment for
excise
tax
evasion, "savage." The same
would be true today for our
income
tax punishments.
Our tax
makers today are amazed to learn that the great
thinkers
of the Enlightenment, William Blackstone (law), Adam
Smith
(political economy), and Montesquieu (political philosophy)
all
condemned making tax evasion a crime.
Montesquieu said it was
contrary
to the spirit of moderate government.
Severe punishments
for tax
offenses, said Blackstone, "destroys all proportion of
punishment,
and puts murderers upon equal footing with such
as are
really guilty of no natural, but merely a positive offence
[not a
real crime]." 21/
Adam
Smith reasoned this way: A tax evader was usually a person
not
capable of committing a true crime, and is
--
In every respect an excellent citizen,
had not the laws
of his country made a crime nature never
meant to be so.
22/
How
savage are our punishments? Consider
what a Kansas City
judge,
Deane Whipple, did to Trula Walker and her husband. For
evading
about $1 million in taxes she got 30 years;
he got 25
years. A Portland, Oregon, high school coach, who
decided to do
tax
planning rather than coaching, got 25 years, and when the
judge,
Robert Maloney, was asked to reconsider this draconian
judgment,
he refused to reduce the sentence.
Leona Helmsley
got 4
years for evading less than 1% of her taxes (she paid
over
$50 million for the year in dispute).
Contrast these
samples
of American judicial psychopathy with European courts.
Sophia
Loren's punishment for tax evasion on a grand scale was 30
days
confinement in a private home -- real tough, she couldn't go
to her
hair dresser who now had to come to her home.
And then
there
was the West German Economic Minister, Otto Lamsdorff, who
for
evading the same amount as Trula Walker, received a modest
fine. He was immediately thereafter elected to the
national
legislature. He called the trial an
"inconvenience." 23/ These
two
European examples are fairly typical of how European courts
punish
tax offenders, much in keeping with the spirit of moderate
government,
as Montesquieu advised.
In
Canada, which has about as many tax evasion convictions as the
United
States (about 2500 per year), a recent study disclosed
that
only six taxpayers ever saw a jail and then only on a short-
term
basis. In the United States everybody
goes to jail, and not
for
short terms. America has a kind of
gulag for disloyalty to
the tax
system, not unlike the gulag in the former Soviet Union
for
disloyalty to the political system.
Third. Liberty's archenemy -- Arbitrary and direct
taxes.
"The
most pernicious of all taxes are the arbitrary," said David
Hume,
the great Scottish philosopher, "They are commonly
converted,
by their management, into punishments on industry. It
is surprising,
therefore, to see them have place among any
civilized
people." 24/ Alexander Hamilton, a
leading proponent
of the
Constitution who favored broad taxing powers, had no use
for
arbitrary taxes. "Whatever liberty
we may boast of in
theory,
it cannot exist in fact while [arbitrary] assessments
continue."
25/
There
never was a tax law more arbitrary than our current income
taxes. In the 1950's, Congress decided that the top
bracket
should
be 91%; Kennedy thought 70%; Reagan 28%;
and Clinton wants
to jack
it back up to around 40%. And as for
exemptions, tax
credits,
and other tax goodies, they vary from legislature to
legislature
-- arbitrariness to the utmost extreme making a field
day for
tax lobbyists and a joy to the tax makers on the Ways and
Means
Committee.
The
Framers of the Constitution thought they had provided against
any
arbitrariness in taxation by commanding that all tax laws be
UNIFORM,
i.e. the same for all. But the
uniformity command
disappeared
in the 20th century when the justices who upheld this
condition,
all died and were replaced with justices willing to
make
that provision an "empty shell" as legal scholars have
described
the present state of affairs. 26/ The
Congress can now
adopt abusive,
discriminatory, arbitrary taxation to the extreme,
thus
fulfilling James Madison's fear expressed in The Federalist,
No. 10:
Yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act
in which
greater opportunity and temptation are
given to a
predominant party to trample on the rules
of justice. Every
shilling with which they overburden the
inferior number is a
shilling saved to their own pockets.
Madison
concluded by arguing that "The Majority ... must be
rendered
unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of
oppression." The Constitutional command of uniformity for
all
taxation
was one means to achieve that end, but once the Court
made
that command an "empty shell," the U.S. Congress has with
impunity
"trampled on the rules of justice," with tax rates
deliberately
made unequal, and with exemptions and other tax
favors
for the best lobbyists, just as Madison had predicted.
Besides
the disastrous consequences of both arbitrary taxation
and
excessive taxation, Montesquieu focused on another archenemy
of
liberty -- direct taxation, which he described as being "natural
to
slavery," unlike indirect taxes, or a "duty on merchandise is
more
natural to liberty, because it is not so direct a relation
to the
person." 27/
This observation
was over two thousand years old. The
Greeks
discovered
it by observing the many empires of the world -- all
were
despotic, tyrannies. And all had direct
forms of taxation,
like
wealth taxes, income or production taxes, poll taxes, and
the like. The Greeks concluded, tyranny was the
consequence of
direct
taxation. Except in times of war,
direct taxes must be
avoided
if liberty is to be preserved.
Cicero,
the great Roman lawyer, also condemned direct taxes as a
danger
to Roman liberty. He said:
Every effort must be made to prevent a
repetition of
this [direct taxes]; and all possible precaution must be
taken to ensure that such a step will
never be needed. But
if any government should find it
necessary to levy a direct
tax, the utmost care has to be devoted to
making it clear to
the entire population that this simply
has to be done
because no alternative exists short of
complete national
collapse. 28/
Why,
you may ask, is direct taxation so bad?
Why did the Greeks
and
Romans have so much contempt and hatred for what we have
lived
under most of this century? They came
to this conclusion
from
history. They saw the tax system of the
Pharaohs of Egypt
and the
enormous oppressive bureaucracy the Pharaohs maintained
to
collect taxes; they may also have
noticed that no word even
exists
in the Egyptian languages that means freedom or liberty.
Freedom
and liberty just didn't exist where direct taxes were in
operation. In the past century, with the income tax,
the people
of
America have seen their liberties slip away, one by one, year
in and
year out. Even in the so-called
pro-taxpayer Reagan
years,
the power of the IRS over everyone's life increased
dramatically. Over 150 penalties were put in operation to
increase
the tax, almost double the tax, for the slightest
slip-up
by the taxpayer. Reagan and the
Congress of his era may
have
reduced rates, but they increased IRS muscle in the process.
Their
process of ever increasing powers, creating a muscle-bound
bureaucracy,
reminiscent of so many ugly tax bureaucracies of the
past,
is what the Greeks and the Founders were warning us about.
This
concept did not go unnoticed by the Framers nor by
Montesquieu. At the Constitutional convention, Madison
echoed
the
Greeks on the matter of direct taxes.
He said, almost as a
matter
of fact, they would only be introduced during an
"extraordinary
emergency." 29/ It was
inconceivable they would
ever be
a permanent, peacetime measure, for the reasons both
Montesquieu
and the ancient Greeks propounded.
What
was inconceivable then, has not been inconceivable in the
20th
century. We have made direct taxation
the order of the day
and we
have re-confirmed, for future generations, that the Greeks
were
right. Direct taxes do produce
tyranny. When the Readers'
Digest
wrote a series on the abuses of power by the IRS, they
entitled
the series, "The Tyranny of the IRS." Unlike wise men,
we have
had to learn from history the hard way -- by reliving what
others
warned us about.
One of
the high points in Thomas Paine's life was his arrest and
charge
of seditious libel while in Britain.
The charge came about
because
of his book, The Age of Reason, in which he condemned
kingships,
especially Britain. To his defense came
one of the
world's
greatest lawyers, Thomas Erskine. He
paid dearly for the
defense
of Paine, having been dismissed by the King from his post
as
Attorney-General. The following is
taken from his speech in
1792,
which seems to explain how our liberties have been lost to
enforce
our income tax system:
... arbitrary power has seldom or never
been introduced
into any country at once. It must be introduced by slow
degrees, and as it were step-by-step, lest
the people see
its approach. The barriers and fences of the people's
liberty must be plucked up one-by-one,
and some plausible
pretenses must be found for removing or
hoodwinking, one
after another, those sentries who are
posted by the
constitution of a free country, for
warning the people
of their danger. 30/
The
evolution of our direct income tax system from an honor to a
spy
system has taken almost 50 years, in slow degrees, "as it
were
step-by-step," under plausible pretenses used to hoodwink
the
sentries "posted by the constitution," i.e., the Supreme
Court
decisions, like Boyd v. United States, a tax case which
declared
unconstitutional a statute that gave the revenue
bureaucracy
the power to order a taxpayer to bring in his books
and
records for examination. Said the
Court:
And any compulsory discovery by extorting
a party's
oath, or compelling the production of his
private books and
papers, to convict him of a crime or to
forfeit his
property, is contrary to the principles
of a free
government. It is abhorrent to the instincts of an
Englishman; it is abhorrent to the instincts of an
American. It may suit the purposes of despotic power;
but it cannot abide the pure atmosphere
of political liberty
or personal freedom. 31/
That
was in 1885. The case has been cited
over 3000 times.
Finally,
in 1983 it took a woman justice on the Supreme Court to
acknowledge
that the Court had "sounded the death knell for
Boyd." 32/ Year in and year out, with each new piece of
tax
legislation,
the IRS has been given increasing powers to spy,
punish
and intimidate taxpayers on a level associated with a
totalitarian
state. The Supreme Court, like Pontius
Pilate, had
the
duty to prevent this abuse of power -- but like Pilate, the
justices
have washed their hands before the multitude. 33/
Finally,
not long ago on the MacNeil-Lehrer news hour on PBS, an
essayist
was finishing what would otherwise have been a fine
talk,
except he concluded his remarks with an assertion I have
heard
frequently since early grammar school days -- "America is the
freest
country in the world." That may
have been true in times
past,
but it is not true today, not by a long shot.
There are
many
countries in the free world that grant their citizens far
greater
freedoms than we enjoy in America. Not
only are we
slipping
to some degree in world commerce, we have slipped a
great
deal more in matters of liberty and freedom.
And the
reason? Our income tax and our government's zeal to
enforce
it at
all costs, including our liberty if it gets in the way. As
a free
nation, we are a third-string operation, thanks to our tax
system.
What
needs to be done to restore our leadership and ranking among
free
nations? The answer is easier than you
may think. We need
to go
back to our roots, to the ideals and passion for liberty
that
was the driving force behind the formation of this nation.
The
Founders had no use for direct taxation as a permanent
revenue
device. They believed, as did the
ancient Greeks and
Romans,
that it was a great danger to liberty.
They were right
and we
are living proof of how right they were.
Without
an income tax there would be no need to photograph
everything
going through your bank account; no
need for your bank
to
notify the government about your cash account or other
financial
dealings; no need for your interest,
dividends, stock
sales,
real estate transactions, and baby sitters to be reported
to Big
Brother. No need for Customs to search
travelers to
make
sure they were not carrying too much money with them; no
need
for judicial terrorism, savage punishments, and psychopathic
judges. The laundry list of government intrusions
would be
minimal. In one fell swoop, the totalitarian muscle
behind our
tax
system would disappear.
Adam
Smith in The Wealth of Nations, sets forth four signs
of a
bad tax system:
First,
a large bureaucracy for administration.
Did you know that
the IRS,
with over 150,000 employees, is the largest tax
bureaucracy
since ancient Rome? Its tentacles reach
out and have
hold on
over 200 million people.
Second,
a system that puts taxpayers through "odious
examinations
... and exposes them to much unnecessary trouble,
vexation,
and oppression."
Third,
a system that encourages evasion.
Fourth,
a system that obstructs the industry of the people, and
discourages
enterprise which might otherwise give "employment to
great
multitudes," i.e. jobs;
that obligates people to excessive
payments
and thereby takes away the funds that would promote
commerce,
industry and employment. 34/
A
national sales tax, if it replaced the income tax, would rid
the
nation of the evils our income tax has produced and the
liberty
it has trampled upon. Economic studies
indicate it will
produce
as much revenue as the income tax. It
will also comply
with
the Constitutional command of uniformity.
Our descendants,
in
centuries to come, would look back upon us, as we look back
upon
our Founders, with admiration for delivering future
generations
from a tax that was oppressive, tyrannical, and
corrupt.
Endnotes
1. Justinian Digest, L.xvii; Naphtali Lewis and Meyer Reinhold,
ed., Roman Civilization, Sourcebook II,
The Empire (New York,
1966) p. 539
2. M. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic
History of the Roman
Empire I (Oxford, 1971) p. 531-32.
3. Salvian, On the Government of God,
ed. Eva M. Sanford (New
York, 1930) pp. 141-49
4. Rostovtzeff, Roman Empire, I. p. 398
5. Ferdinand Lot, The End of the Ancient
World and the Beginning
of the Middle Ages (New York, 1961)
p. 175
6. Charles Adams, For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the
Course of Civilization (Lanham, MD,
1993) ch. 11
7. ibid., p. 187
8. Martin Hume, Spain, Its Greatness and
Decay (1479-1788)
(Cambridge, 1898) p. 221